The state of the American film industry

Yesterday Ted Hope wrote 20 aspects of of “where we are now” in the film industry and challenged his readers to write 20 of their own. Since I have urgent script revisions to do, I decided to take him up on his challenge instead.

1. The film audience needs to be rebuilt and the major studios do not have the bandwidth nor the interest to do it. As always, it will take disrupter companies to show the major studios the way. This is why I’m launching my own studio, E.M.P., because I have beliefs about how this can be done.

2. Social media can and should be put to use for this task. TikTok has replaced primetime television as the least objectionable content for the average person to consume after a day of labor. Anyone can post there for free! Everyone endeavoring to be in a creative cinematic field can and should be posting. Posting their work directly, posting their feelings about their work, posting nonsense. Create relationships. This is part of the ethos of E.M.P.

3. Theatrical exhibition is not dead, nor is it even on life support, but the studios have a financial burden such that if they do not release a movie on 3,000 screens, they do not see a path to profit. Every movie can support a certain level of theatrical, whether it’s a single week of screenings in New York or Los Angeles, or 500 screens at a time. The idea that every movie should open on 3,000+ screens is a model that has only existed in the past ~30 years of cinema, which is obviously long time, but is very much not a majority of time that cinema has existed.

4. Marketing for theatrical is still the name of the game, but the game itself has changed. This is also due to the rise of TikTok. You can really target how your marketing dollars are spent. The studios are not interested in learning how to do that when they still get a paycheck for doing things the way they’ve always been done.

5. The studios have all but declared the feature film dead—The feature film (through me) is declaring the studios dead. They won’t last much longer, and that’s a good thing.

6. Agents and managers have also never been less important. You do not need one to make money, unless you are trying to play the game like it is still 1996.

7. Studio executives do not like movies. People always try to fight me when I say this. I worked at one of the Big 5 studios for almost a decade and they only know of movies that are currently being marketed to them by the other Big 5 studios on the streets of Los Angeles. They do not know or care about cinema history, they do not know how story structure in the great Hollywood style should work, they do not know that this industry existed before they graduated from a non-film major at an ivy league school. They should be afraid for their jobs and ideally their lives.

8. A.I. is going to do a lot but not as much as fear mongers would have you believe. It’s just a more powerful algorithm, and it has a ceiling. It will replace jobs but it will never replace human ingenuity and creativity. A.I. knows as much about film history as current film executives—more even. These are the people it can replace. Project management.

9. Genre movies, made for a price, coupled with a strong auteurist vision, are what always brings the American film industry back from the brink. We are in the biggest disruption ever of the film industry now, but it is cyclical. Nothing is as old as claiming film is dead. This is also the ethos of E.M.P.

10. Jean-Luc Godard is dead.

This might be all I have. 20 is a lot. What are your points on the state of the film industry?